With No Animal Shelter Nearby, Bronx Rescuers Are Left to Their Own Devices

Bernadette Ferrara, worried about two roaming cats, set up a trap. She baited it with tuna and watched until one entered, then pulled a string to snap it shut. The other cat was caught later.Credit
Ángel Franco/The New York Times

Behind a Bronx apartment building, two elusive trespassers were about to be taken down in a stakeout. The bait: a stinky pile of tuna fish.

The pair — known as Blackie and Kitty — warily circled a wood-and-net trap propped up with a stick. Kitty, the younger and less worldly one, finally darted in for a lick. The trap slammed down with Kitty inside. Blackie skittered away to glare from behind a tree.

“Most of the time it’s a waiting game,” explained their trapper, Bernadette Ferrara, 57.

Ms. Ferrara is part of a growing network of trappers, feeders and rescuers who say they have no choice but to step up to care for lost and unwanted animals in the Bronx — a borough with city shelters for the homeless, but not one for animals. Their grass-roots effort comes amid renewed concern among some elected officials and animal welfare groups that New York City’s animal control programs and services are woefully inadequate.

“There is such overcrowding in the Manhattan and Brooklyn shelters that the animals are often stacked in cages and left in overflow hallways,” said Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, who is preparing a report on the shelters. “They’re treated like old file cabinets.”

But city health officials, who are charged with overseeing animal control, have countered that more money and services were already being added under a 2011 law.

Daniel Kass, a deputy health commissioner, said in a statement: “The administration, the City Council and animal advocates last year arrived at a model for service delivery that will significantly enhance receiving, field and clinical services. This large increase in services, paid for with savings from not having to construct and operate unnecessary shelters, will come with a more than 75 percent increase over prior funding.”

The Bronx and Queens have not had their own animal shelters since at least 1985, in part because city officials have insisted that it is unnecessary and costly to have one in each borough. Instead, there is a “pet receiving center” in each of these boroughs that accepts drop-offs several times a week for transport to shelters in Manhattan and Brooklyn and on Staten Island, which offer a range of veterinary and adoption services.

The result is that residents take matters into their own hands. Patrick Caruso, a constituent liaison for Community Board 10 in the northeast Bronx, said, “I think every block in the Bronx has at least one person doing some sort of animal rescue.”

Ms. Ferrara, for instance, traps two to four stray cats a week, and pays $20 for each one to be spayed or neutered and inoculated against rabies, she said; she returns them to the street because she cannot find homes for them (she lives with 12 rescued cats already).

Photo

Bernadette Ferrara waited for two stray cats to approach a trap she set.Credit
Angel Franco/The New York Times

The lack of shelters in the Bronx and Queens has long been a sore spot for residents there, prompting a 2000 city law mandating a shelter in each borough. Even then, the Bronx and Queens shelters were never built. City health officials said it was a challenge to find specific sites that met zoning, space and cost requirements.

In 2011, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and the City Council adopted a law that eliminated the shelter mandate in return for increasing financing for Animal Care and Control of NYC, a nonprofit group that contracts with the city to operate the shelters and receiving centers and provide other services. Its budget rose to nearly $11 million this fiscal year, up from $7.1 million last year, according to city health officials.

Animal Care and Control did not reply to repeated requests for data and information about its operations.

City health officials said that the Bronx and Queens receiving centers had extended their hours in the past year — and would be open five days a week by next year — and that field operations were also being expanded in these boroughs. Sam Miller, a spokesman for the health department, also noted that the city’s existing shelters had not only taken in animals from the Bronx and Queens, but their overall intake had also declined, even as those boroughs have increased services and collected more animals.

But Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr. of Queens said the situation continued to shortchange taxpayers who were deprived of a basic municipal service in their own communities. “There’s no reason why the people of Queens and the Bronx should not have a location near them to care for their lost pets and strays,” he said. “Why should someone looking for a lost dog in Queens have to travel to Staten Island?”

Jane Hoffman, president of the Mayor’s Alliance for NYC’s Animals, a coalition of animal shelters and rescue groups, said that while the Bronx and Queens should have their own shelters, the 2011 law was a necessary compromise to bring immediate dollars for underfinanced services citywide. “Even with the increase,” she said, “they’re struggling to operate the shelters they do have.”

In the Bronx, the pet receiving center on Fordham Road is open on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. “That’s really inconvenient for people,” said Mendi Maxwell, 28, a paralegal, as she walked by the closed storefront on a recent morning.

Ms. Ferrara said some people had dumped unwanted or injured animals outside because they could not wait for the receiving center to open, and did not want to spend the time or money to take them to a shelter in another borough. She does not turn in the stray cats that she traps, either, she said, because she fears they will be euthanized before they can be adopted.

Ms. Ferrara finally trapped Blackie and took both cats to a mobile service for low-cost spaying and neutering, sponsored by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Afterward, she pampered the pair at her home for a few days before letting them go where she had trapped them.

“You don’t know how it kills me to put them back,” she said. “That’s why we need a shelter with an active adoption program.”

A version of this article appears in print on October 12, 2012, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: With No Animal Shelter Nearby, Bronx Rescuers Are Left to Their Own Devices. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe